Evaluating the Usability of E-Voting Technologies

Voting has been an accepted means for electing candidates, receiving public approval for referendums and budgets, and for many other tasks where the will of the people, whether a broad population or a select group, can be recorded and measured in a tangible way. Because of advances in technology, together with problems inherent in manual forms of voting, the concepts and issues relating to electronic voting (e-voting) and various other technology-based forms, are been proposed, discussed, and examined. The goal of all such systems is the casting and recording of the votes from eligible voters as they intended to be cast, with adequate security. This security requires that there be no identifiable connection between the voter and the vote that is cast, while providing an audit trail that can be used to validate that every vote was counted and tallied, as cast. The focus of this paper is to examine electronic voting technologies from the perspective of usability in controlled environments. Current research has shown that such systems form the majority of the nascent e-voting technologies, primarily because they have come closest to solving the usability and security issues inherent in technology–based voting systems.